Monthly Archives: April 2015

Io being squeezed

Posted on April 6, 2015 by lindenmuthadam

We all know that Jupiter exerts tremendous tidal squeezing on Io, but we need images to truly grasp the magnitude of this force. This image shows Io spewing a 200 mile high volcanic plume! For reference, that is greater than the distance from Nashville to Knoxville! It is baffling to think that tidal squeezing alone […] Continue reading →

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Green Galaxies?

Posted on April 6, 2015 by christophermfitzgerald

Back in 2007, using the popular website Galaxy Zoo, Hanny van Arkel discovered galaxies with emitting a green color. Though stars emit the color green, it is thought that it isn’t possible for their color to appear green. Now equipped with new … Continue reading → Continue reading →

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Why I did not like the movie “Interstellar”

Posted on April 6, 2015 by farhannshabab

When Cristopher Nolan’s Interstellar hit the theaters in November 2014, I decided to wait for reviews from my friends. My friends, most of whom were pursuing Electrical Engineering and Physics majors, had this to say about the movie after they watched it: “Meh, too many logic holes”. So I skipped the movie; but over the […] Continue reading →

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Lunar Eclipse Creates an Apocalyptic View

Posted on April 6, 2015 by leedd1

Last weekend, one of the first two lunar eclipses of 2015 occurred and left a great view. The moon dimmed and turned red giving it an eerie and dark feeling, leading some people to dub it as a blood moon. As we have learned already, eclipses consist of two parts. The penumbra is when the […] Continue reading →

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Space has a lot of….space

Posted on April 6, 2015 by alephnulluniverse

Most people, including myself before ASTR201, have only seen seen the scaled models of the solar systems where planets are to scale but right next to each other. However, space is called space for a reason. You may have heard of the real life scaled down model, but you would never understand the true emptiness […] Continue reading →

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An End to the Discovery of Bright Kuiper Belt Objects?

Posted on April 6, 2015 by adyacob

Check out this image from Universe Today: This shows the largest known objects in the Kuiper Belt. Pretty interesting to …

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Merging Green Galaxies

Posted on April 6, 2015 by adyacob

This picture is a pretty cool visual representation of what’s going on way out there in outer space. This picture …

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The Search for Extrasolar Planets

Posted on April 6, 2015 by farhannshabab

Extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, lie outside our solar system. We have so far discovered nearly 2000 exoplanets, most of which are Jovian planets like Jupiter. However in 2009, a possibly Earth like planet was discovered: Gliese 581d had the potential to support liquid water on its possibly rocky surface. It has a mass of around […] Continue reading →

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Martian Aurora?

Posted on April 6, 2015 by revanth111

Source: National Geographic NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft has recently detected a strange aurora in the lower atmosphere of Mars. Dubbed “Christmas lights” by scientists, the mysterious phenomenon occurred for five days in December, following a solar electron storm. On Earth, auroras are formed when these particles slam into atmospheric atoms, but on Mars, the lack of […] Continue reading →

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Studying the Effects of Space Travel on the Human Body

Posted on April 6, 2015 by conorastr201

NASA is conducting an experiment to determine the effects of living in space on the human body. Such studies have been done before, but this one is unprecedented in the length of time the subject will spend in space (a full 365 days) and in that the participants are identical twins. One astronaut named Scott […] Continue reading →

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